


I Can't Help This Awful Energy

by SongsofSamael



Series: B A D L A N D S [1]
Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, I tried real hard to write smut but I got too embarrassed so this happened, Mental Illness, Multi, anyway, ongoing series, probably, violence in the form of Illya beating up inanimate objects and kicking his own ass
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2015-08-28
Packaged: 2018-04-17 18:30:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4676921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SongsofSamael/pseuds/SongsofSamael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>1/16 of the "Badlands" album series.<br/>This one is done for the song "Control".<br/>[http://www.vevo.com/watch/halsey/control-(audio)/USUV71502211]<br/>Just basic canon divergence following missions and what-have-you. A lot of Illya-centric focus this time because he is my big Russian baby.</p><p> How Gaby and Napoleon help Illya find his center.</p><p>[[**I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, trying to romanticize mental illness or imply you can cure psychotic episodes with kisses. If this depiction is in any way, shape or form inaccurate or offensive, please do not hesitate to tell me and I shall fix it accordingly. Thank you.]]</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Can't Help This Awful Energy

The first time Illya has a psychotic episode in front of his team, it's outside a church in Prague. 

It starts with the hand twitch. Every time. Without fail. The spasm wrenches his arm; begs to be pulled into a fist. The tremor continues, an earthquake from his core up. It shakes the muscles of Illya's mantle; brings sweat to his crust. His body trembles; clenches, and eventually erupts with rage. It's a violent, unnatural force which rips the sense from his head and the focus from his eyes. It yanks him apart one tectonic plate at a time until he's left to raggedly piece himself back together. He breaks in halves and fourths and eighths; setting new records on the Richter scale. 

The recovery is typically a lonely process. It is him; by himself, nursing sprains and finding brooms. It's wiping blood like magma from his face; watching it pool into the icy sink. It's vomit and piss, splinters and breakage. It's high hotel bills. It's totaled cars. It's bent guns and dental care. 

It is endless. 

The church triggers him because the nuns inside remind him of his mother when they kneel on the tiled floor in prayer. She; never quite so pious, was forced to kneel not for God but for the men who thought to call themselves as such. 

They are there to infiltrate drug smugglers using religious relics to pass drugs around. The Red Mary Affair, Waverly called it. Gaby wanted it to be the Bloody Mary, but Napoleon's enthusiasm for alcohol took the fun out of it. So she said, at any rate. 

(Mostly it was due to Illya's superstitious nature, but none of them are keen to admit that.)

Thus they pose rather effectively as tourists for a little while. Students; artists, come to study the architecture (God, Illya is sick to death of architecture). 

Illya snaps when he notices the anomaly of the nuns. Most; elderly and quiet, are fine. It's the young women he doesn't trust. One in particular; Sister Henrietta, it’s just--something about her, something he can't place—

Then it hits him like a switch.

He sees his mother when she flashes him an uncertain smile. It's the hollow cheeks; the vacant blue eyes.

The act. The act of someone trying too hard to be invisible. 

He sees her. 

And then he sees red.  
The next thing he remembers is being escorted away from the church with bleeding hands, his cheeks aflame, legs shaky. His shoulders hurt from the way he began to rip stones from the church's ancient walls. His eyes are burning, like he's ceased blinking completely. 

Gaby dismisses an argumentative and understandably frustrated Solo to his private room in the hotel. She stays with Illya, suggesting, but by forcing, that he sit down. 

He sits only when his legs will no longer hold him. He collapses on the bed, ears ringing, as Gaby croons in German and bandages his hands. When he asks her; in Russian, for silence, she gives it to him. 

Her touch is gentle, deft. The chop shop girl knows her way around breakage and rust. She brushes the blood crusting at his knuckles away and washes his hands, anoints them in ointment, and binds them up tight. It's holy in its own way.

When she takes his face, he lets her. When she kisses his cheeks, his brow, his nose, his jaw, his lips...she kisses his soul clean. 

He can see again. Clearly; wholly. He can breathe again. He can...simply be; with her. He wallows in her presence as the rich would in champagne. He takes her lips like communion and keeps coming back to her mouth to confess his silent sins.  
She accepts him as he is and doesn't question his actions. In a way, despite their rocky start, she understands how he ticks. The watch on his wrist keeps him steady. She teaches him how to follow the ticks with breathing exercises. With matching his pulse. With care; concern, and caution, she makes sure he always has it with him when he has a break. It gives him an anchor onto which he can hang when the red tide of anger threatens to wash him away in torrents of violence and blood. 

It's not a cure-all. Gaby knows this. Illya knows this. 

But somehow, her steady, strong little hands on his shoulders ebbs the pain. Her lips on his shoulder coax an ease to his muscles. Her hands can trace the rifts left on his skin by mistakes and a lack of control. 

She brings him back, one link of his anchor at a time. She plants flags in the form of bruises on his scorched earth; better than scars. Better than fear. 

It's not a mistake, and her soft body curving against his is the only good thing to come out of this particular error in his judgment. His lapse of self-control. 

The second time he has a moment of psychosis, Illya and Solo are alone. 

Gaby is taken from them a dark night in September. The rain is pouring, the city of Prague is awash in diamonds and gold. Street lamps gild the cobbles in the darkness. The air smells like cinnamon and sweat and the wind and rain mourn the loss of summer.

Illya does not mourn. 

He rages. 

Napoleon is the first thing he sees through his crimson haze. He is the last thing Illya attacks. Kuryakin instead crushes the door of the cafe from which she was abducted, he breaks it down and down and down like a maniac desperate to solve a problem would anything else. He snaps the splinters and fills his hands with hate; readies them for war. He beats the wood to a pulp and throws the iron hinges through the windows. He saves one to bar the door. 

He is ready to set the whole thing afire when Solo gets in his way. 

And then it's bone under his hand. The sickening snap of his still-healing knuckles on Napoleon's prized cheekbone. Napoleon's sharp cry. His retaliation; which Illya barely feels. The rain. The stones. The wood. 

They fall to the alley ground and Illya snarls against the pressure of rocks jutting into his back. Napoleon is already bruising; fragile thief that he is, shouting in his face that this isn't solving anything. That this does nobody any good. Not him nor Gaby. 

He is able to spit out that the only person Illya is aiding at the moment is the enemy before Illya wrenches him into a chokehold. He wants to kill Solo, no—that’s not it, he just wants to kill something to know that he still can. To know that he can still command some aspect of who he is and what he can do. To find his focus again; because his watch won’t tick without Gaby there, somehow. Because without her there, everything she is and has taught him flies away, shattering into a hundred million pieces.

He holds Solo tight as he can.

The pressure is familiar. Soothing. If nothing else it gives him something to concentrate on. He holds Solo until the ringing in his ears has stopped; his grip loosening the longer he holds him. Until he's just lying in the alley half-destroyed like the walls of the café itself, his arms keeping Solo secure and his heart slowing enough to match the pulse in his partner's neck. Their breathing synchronizes. Solo turns toward him after blinking black spots out of his eyes.

When they kiss, it's electric and angry and bittersweet. It's desperation that drives Solo's mouth against his. 

Illya does not initiate. 

He does; however, reciprocate. 

The idea of having only Solo frightens him. He misses Gaby. Fears for her, under his icy exterior. He can feel that echoing back to him in the soft groan Solo ghosts into his mouth. His arms find Solo’s neck again, this time to draw him close. He wonders, distantly, if Solo will find distaste in him or the rain ruining his fine clothes or any reason whatsoever to pull away. If this is a test. But gradually, like the pressure releasing, the switch flips the other way and brings care with it. He slips his tongue between Napoleon’s lips and draws a steadying hand up the other man’s back. His inhalation brings heat to the cold soldier’s core, and his nerves flood with relief from the loss of tension.

They kiss until Illya is quiet. They kiss until they come up with a better plan. 

(As it turns out, Gaby, ever resourceful, rescue herself via a deadly combination of gasoline and opium, but still.)

The third time Illya breaks, the third time he falls apart, Gaby and Napoleon are both there to catch him. He lays in Gaby’s arms, or rather, she sprawls against him, the gentle brush of her skin on his skin as welcome as the sun. Her legs curve around his and hold him steady as they make love hours later. When he is calm, when all consent is given and all is right. She rocks against him in a rhythm he’s still adjusting to, something steady. Something focused. She has the mechanics down to an art; a science. It’s what she does. She works the problems out of him. She fuels him with kisses and traces his neck with her tongue, savoring the ridges of his skin until he’s broken in other ways—broken to heal. A dislocated plate shifting back into place.

At the same time, Solo favors his back with kisses that burn, promising the right kind of fire. He kisses the mountain range that is Illya’s spine; he lovingly caps each bump with nips as he works his way down. He traces Kuryakin’s hips, whispering in that pleasant, drawling voice of his of his fondness for Illya’s skin, every scar and nook and cranny. He plays with the marks on Illya’s flesh as he rides him, drawing muffled, earnest Russian out of him and laughter (endearing; not mocking) from Gaby as a result. In the end, they’re all left holding one another, Napoleon and Gaby unconscious (the latter snoring very, very softly), and Illya left to gaze at the ceiling, utterly and strangely content. 

So it goes. 

And, for a little while, the three of them lose their control together. As a team.

They save each other. 

Control isn't something that comes easy to any of them. They find it in one another, however. Gaby finds it in outwitting Napoleon. Napoleon finds it in one-upping Illya (or trying to). Illya finds it in both of them—in the way Gaby takes his shaking hands until the tremors stop, in the way Napoleon knows when it’s time to see Illya out of a complicated situation or stuffy room…

That's why they work so well. Because it’s never about control.

It’s about knowing when to lose it.


End file.
